Climate Factors Associated with Historic Spruce Beetle (Coleoptera: Curculionidae) Outbreaks in Utah and Colorado

Abstract This study investigated relationships between climate and historic spruce beetle, Dendroctonus rufipennis Kirby (Coleoptera: Curculionidae), outbreaks in northern and southeastern Utah and western Colorado between 1905 and 1996. A chronology of outbreak years was constructed from historic records, research papers, newspapers, and other sources of information. Historic climate data for the region included annual and mean monthly temperature and precipitation, in addition to Palmer drought severity index (PDSI) values estimated from tree rings. Classification and regression tree analysis (CART) was used to identify those climate factors most important for predicting historic spruce beetle outbreaks. The factors identified by the best CART model included mean December temperature, mean September temperature 1 yr before outbreak years, the mean estimated PDSI value of the 5-yr period before outbreak years, and mean October precipitation. The resulting model correctly classified nonoutbreak and outbreak years 67 and 70% of the time, respectively.

• Publication year

  2008

• Venue

  Environmental Entomology

• Publication date

  2008-04-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1603/0046-225X(2008)37[281:CFAWHS]2.0.CO;2PMID 18419898
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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